Soldiers Home from War
by Nyah
Summary: Pain can be controlled... you just disconnect it. Sarah, Kyle, John, Derek


**Title: **Soldiers Home from War

**Warnings:** Character Death, Dark

**Disclaimer:** Written for love not money. I own none of it.

_Some time after Judgment Day_

"Pain can be controlled… you just disconnect it." Kyle said.

It had been a long time since she'd welcomed the sound of Kyle's voice. It was comforting and she didn't want comfort here. He was in the corner of her cell now, leaning against the wall, arms crossed. The room smelled sterile. The world smelled sterile. It smelled plastic and bleach and not at all like living things.

She sat on the floor, legs crossed, body balled protectively around her fist. She'd wrapped the fist in her t-shirt before pummeling the double- paned glass of her high window. Even so, blood was pooling under the skin of the heal of her hand and the broken bones of her knuckles were like bits of glass wearing away at each other.

A hand rested on her shoulder. Reese had stolen up quietly behind her. When she straightened he slowly pried her bloodied fingers open. Pain lanced up her arm so quickly that if she hadn't been looking at the broken and bleeding evidence before her she couldn't have guessed that it had come from her hand. She bit her scream into her lip, biting deeply before one pain could distract her from another. "Cyborgs don't feel pain," she said when she could work her jaw loose. "I do. Don't do that again."

The faintest of murmurings sounded outside her cell. Reese pulled them back into his corner, ready for whatever came through the door. The flood of neon fluorescence from the hallway created a nimbus of painful brightness around him. Around it. "Mom," said the voice that sounded so much like her son's. "They called me. They said you hurt yourself again."

This perfect facsimile of John looked older than her son. How old was he? How old was she? She could tell time by the faint lines on his face, but then again, he would never age.

The thing that wore John's skin came closer and held out its hand. "Mom, you're bleeding everywhere. You should let the doctors bandage that."

She only shook her head, knowing they'd only drug her if she failed to give a response.

"Just let them take a look at it. I know it hurts."

"Pain can be controlled," she said. She didn't know why they didn't learn. Learning was what they were supposed to be good at. It had been months, years maybe, since she'd told them anything new.

"You can't keep doing this to yourself," the thing said, it was so very good at pleading. And defeat. It had ceased to cry when it tried to get her to talk. "We won. It's over."

It was never over. They'd never stop? Well neither would she. While there was breath in her body, she wouldn't stop. They'd taken everyone from her. But she wouldn't stop. "You still don't get it, do you?"

Judgment Day had come and gone and taken those she loved with it, one by one. When the thing that looked like John had first come to her cell, she thought maybe he'd come to her like his father came to her. She'd thrown her arms around him, weeping. But then she felt the coldness under his skin, the impossibly hard ribs of metal and the shock had nearly broken her.

Now the John-thing came to her from time, maybe everyday. It wanted something from her. But what? Some bit of information she didn't know she had? Some key to a last human outpost? Or did it want her secret? Did it want Kyle because he was the only thing she had left?

The machine shook its head. "You'll have to sedate her," she heard it say as it opened the door to leave.

###

"We won," John reminded himself in the parking lot. "I swear we won."

He opened the passenger's side door and climbed over the front seat to the driver's side, noting that he could get the other door fixed since he'd been promoted at work. He made video games. The doom's day ones were quite good, or so he'd been told.

On the way home he stopped to lay flowers on his uncle's grave, a memorial to a war that never happened. It had been almost ten years now since Derek was killed running down their last lead. Neither Sarah nor John had seen him get hit and Sarah's face was a mass of confusion when he collapsed at her feet, his last victim having already dropped a few yards away.

Sarah was on her knees instantly, bloody to the elbows. She half held Derek and half held him together. Of the three of them, Derek was the most calm. He'd been shot before and the fact that this was the bullet that would kill him didn't seem to change things much. "Reese!" Sarah screamed so many times that soon it was just a sound. She tried to pull him up, tears dripping from her jaw to his cheeks. Derek was almost smiling.

"Just nature correcting its mistake," Derek said and didn't speak again.

Moments later John's mother said hollowly, "On your feet soldier." John didn't know if she was talking to him or to Derek's body or to herself. But it was none of these.

With no more leads to go on, John took Sarah home. No more leads came.

Judgment Day came and went unmarked but for John Connor's eyes on the clock.

The world was quiet.

Slowly John realized that they had won. The world was quiet. This was what winning felt like.

Cameron had been dissembled months earlier when the damaged to her chip had finally become irreparable. With Derek gone, John realized, there was no more evidence, nothing that made it all any more real than a dream.

The world was quiet.

Sarah sat on her bed, talking to Kyle.

###

"Nobody goes home. Nobody else comes through," Kyle said.

Perhaps someone heard when she finally managed, after months of cautious effort, to work a heavy steel leg off her cot and drive it through that high glass window. Perhaps they heard when her fists followed the leg, breaking away shards of the thick glass. But they didn't come.

The window was too high and too small for her to wriggle her way through. But that didn't matter. Blood flowed thickly from her wrist and forearms where the glass had cut deep. Great washes of warmth spread with each beat her heart countered by shocking waves of cold. Soon she would be small enough to fit.

"What's it like when you go through time?" Sarah asked and felt Kyle's hand on her cheek.

"White light. Pain. It's like being born, maybe."

Born. She liked the sound of that.

End.


End file.
